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TI: So is this now a good time to segue into some of your current projects? I went back and re-read the interview I did with you, and something that popped out, I had forgotten, was your father was actually very much into farming.

SA: Yes.

TI: And, in fact, I think you mentioned he was very much into organic farming, organic fertilizers. And now you're doing a new venture, and it has to do with food. And this is after you've been looking at national security and space, and you're coming back to something that, actually, your father was kind of innovative with almost a hundred years ago. So can you talk a little about that and how you're thinking about that?

SA: Yeah, I can tell you quite a bit about that. I have to tell you an interesting story. I've been interviewed on, for release on our company, so they all asked me personally, "How you got started into farming." So I said, "Well, I have an interesting story to tell," and it started with gardening. My father was a gardener in an estate, and the nephew of the owner of the estate became the heir to the estate because the lady that had the estate was a widow and had no children. So the person that took over the estate and my father, even though there was quite a bit of age difference, he was a little bit younger, they developed a relationship because this person became very interested in my dad's farming technique because they had farm as well as a garden, so he ran both the garden and the farm operation. And they got together and talked about organic fertilizer as something that they would like to promote together. So what happened was my father -- and I'm sure the, this person's name was Robert Kirkwood, who really became the Controller of California later in life. But he basically encouraged my father go to into the fertilizer business and try to promote organic fertilizer. So he and my father arranged to import fertilizer from Manchuria, and this is the time period when Japan had conquered Manchuria and fertilizer was one of the key items that were being (...) exported from Manchuria, so my dad went into the fertilizing business. And then after that, when it was, it became very difficult to get fertilizer from Manchuria because of the conflict, he bought a farm.

So that story ties in to why my father really wanted... the son that helped him a lot, and they developed a great rapport, is also the person that helped my father make sure that our property was protected during the war, and really made sure they took care of us, and he was a Stanford grad. So one of the things my dad wanted me to do was to get educated and go to Stanford. So my dad wanted to have me take agriculture at Stanford, so I told him, "If I'm going to go to college, I'm going to get away as far as I can from the farm." [Laughs]

TI: And now, at eighty-four...

SA: At age eighty, I'm back on the farm, he's up there looking down and says, "You finally wised up."

TI: All that money he spent to send you to Stanford finally paid off. That's a good story. So tell me, what are you doing with farming? Because it's not the farming that your father would have thought.

SA: No. Basically, as I told you earlier, we're running out of water, we're running out of land. A lot of the big farming today uses chemical fertilizer, herbicide, and it's not the best for health, and it's not good for the soil, it basically ruins the soil. So we said, you know, farming, the technique of farming, even though the mechanization has been modernized with technology, the whole cycle of farming is thousands of years old. So we said, you know, maybe it's time to revolutionize agriculture. So we said, you know, if we could take... and what really gave us the idea, two of us, the partner that I've been involved with is Ko Nishimura, and he and I studied Saudi Arabia, because the Saudi Arabian government, the environmental agency, wanted to clean up the oil field as they begin to run out of oil, so they were thinking ahead. And so we proposed to use satellite imagery to decide how to remediate the oil field with the right kind of remediation agent, and pick the right places to start the remediation process. ARAMCO said, "Absolutely not, you're not coming into our territory. We don't want any environmental activity." And we went to the Chinese to do the same thing with their rivers, same thing. Says, "GDP is where we're at. We don't care whether we contaminate or not, we have to grow our GDP." So with that, we also talked about creating an eco-city, ecologically balanced city, and with an ecologically balanced city, we said we have to create agriculture as the foundation. That's how all cities have to be fed, with food. And in Saudi Arabia you can't grow any food, it's all imported. So we said, "If we can create a farm in Saudi Arabia and make it profitable, we can do that anywhere in the world." So that's what we've got to do, so that's how we conceptualized the farm to grow in soil with very little water using LED lights, using an environmentally controlled building, and that's what we have developed. And it's totally sustainable, totally organic, and because we grow in soil, and we created "living soil," the produce that we grow tastes better. We can grow heirloom seeds and we have a set of produce that, variety-wise, is very unique, that doesn't exist in the market. So the reason our investors are so excited about us is because they see us having a very unique set of produce that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.

TI: Are there barriers to entry, though? It seems like just hearing you talk, couldn't someone else replicate it? Get a big warehouse and plant beds...

SA: Well, a couple of things enabled us to get where we are: number one is LEDs. If it wasn't for LEDs, we couldn't even start. Because the amount of power and the amount of heat light generates is a non-starter. But LED has made it possible for us to grow with sunlight, hundred percent artificial light. The second thing here is using techniques. This is where Ko's experience was very important because the electronic industry had to develop a very efficient manufacturing process. We learned in building satellites that at the end you had to develop a manufacturing assembly and test process. So getting efficiency in operations becomes a key to economic effectiveness. So we decided, we said, farming has been done in a certain way for generations. If we can now totally change the way we grow food, we can now revolutionize the growing process, and that's how we can get the economic benefit.

TI: Well, I'm guessing, too, when you say efficiencies, Ko's experience, so probably even the harvesting process must be very, made more efficient.

SA: It's a good point, although agriculture today has developed their own pretty efficient harvesting process. We can do the same thing. But what is more important here is on an acre, we can grow, like a five thousand square feet building, probably like a fifteen acre farm.

TI: So you can produce as much as a fifteen acre farm with a five thousand square foot building.

SA: In a regular farm, maybe you'd grow three to five cycles, we can grow twenty cycles. So you grow more cycles vertical.

TI: Well, the other thing about your --

SA: And because you can control the climate, you can get the growth rate up, so it takes less time.

TI: And the other thing is location, too. You can locate anywhere.

SA: Right with the consumer.

TI: Right, you can locate it in Saudi Arabia or in a northern climate where there's even a shorter growing cycle.

SA: You can go to any city in the world, basically, and service that urban center. So it's a totally different concept.

TI: So right now you're only a few years into it, so is it still... so where are you, still proof of concept?

SA: Well, we're operating in San Leandro right now, and we're getting ready to design a farm to go back east.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.